DEVOPS! Hippest of buzzwords, earner of thousands! Learn to harness the immense power of devops for yourself, by coming to the Spring 2018 Computer Club Workshop/Talk Series. We will tell you the tricks that will allow you to transcend the annoyances of administration and offenses of operations, and return to the elegant, pure simplicity of raw code!

These talks will take place on Wednesdays starting at 8:00 PM in Wean 5415 throughout the semester.

This schedule is also available as an iCalendar file which is compatible with all calendaring software.

Virtualization in Theory

Virtual Machines are an increasingly popular way to divide up physical machines, but what's really going on under the hood? We'll take a look at the history of virtualization, different strategies, as well as the hardware that makes efficient virtualization possible.

Feb 21

Virtualization in Practice

Okay, so you actually want to know how we do virtualization in the real world. This talk will explore some common pieces of software for virtualizing physical machines, and explain some of the benefits and drawbacks of the different options available.

Mar 07

Cryptocurrency

With cryptocurrencies making mainstream news, you might be wondering how it all works. We'll be covering what cryptocurrencies are, how they work, and what has been keeping them in the headlines for the last few months.

Mar 21

GPGPU Programming

FPGAs are revolutionizing the computing industry by allowing logic designers to reconfigure circuitry on the fly, allowing for rapid development of new hardware where an ASIC would be prohibitively costly or impractical. But how does it all work? Can software-like code be used to design hardware?

Mar 28

Reconfigurable Logic

GPUs are becoming an increasingly popular target for programmers looking to squeeze extra power out of their computers. Attend this talk to see how GPGPU (General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) programming allows computationally heavy tasks to be mapped onto hardware originally designed for drawing triangles.

Apr 04

Meltdown, Spectre, and Microarchitecture

Early this year, two massive hardware vulnerabilities shook the world of computer security. This talk will explore the modern microarchitectural quirks that allowed these attacks to work, as well as the various workarounds and mitigations for these attacks (and any others that might occur between the time of printing of this poster and the talk).

Apr 11

Designing Safety and Security into Life-Critical Systems

What do you get when you combine a car with a computer? A computer that can cause life-threatening problems! Modern vehicles are massively complex computing platforms, with nearly one hundred processors and over a million lines of code. The complexity is only growing, especially as car manufacturers rush to add "app stores" to their dashboards and allow the owner to download potentially buggy software from the internet! How do you design a system to protect the people inside (and outside) from harm while still allowing user-downloaded content? It starts with designing a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) that can guarantee separation of important safety-critical code from code that cannot be verified or trusted. In this tech talk, we'll discuss dealing with the complexity of mixed-criticality systems through strict separation of execution time, memory-space, and resources.

Apr 25

Esoteric Programming Languages

Brainf**k, Whitespace, and Malbolge are just three of the many esoteric programming languages people have designed in an ever-increasing struggle to create the most obtuse, user-unfriendly language possible. We'll showcase a few of these intentionally confusing languages, and share some advice for actually writing code in them.